Trudeau's election campaign was not about ideology, but about political style. Harper's default setting was ‘nasty’, and he positively revelled in it and lost the election
There's an old joke that goes: Why did the Canadian cross the roadIJ Answer: To get to the middle of the road. likewise (so they say) if you cut the average Canadian open you would find two words engraved on his or her heart. One would be ‘moderate’. The other would be ‘nice’.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was four months short of 10 years in office, when he was swept out of power in last week's election, was a moderate Right-wing politician, although he pretended to be a hard right one. Six of his 10 Budgets were in deficit, and he ended up adding $150 billion to Canada's national debt. Even when faced with a global recession, that's not what hard-right politicians do.
Similarly, the New Democratic Party is a very moderate left-wing party by anybody's standards (except those of Americans) and Justin Trudeau's liberals have always believed that they owned the middle of the road. The 78-day election campaign, which was a tight three-horse race until the last couple of weeks, was not about ideology at all. It was about political style.
Mr Harper didn't do ‘nice’. His default setting was ‘nasty’, and he positively revelled in it. He was a control freak who instinctively tried to hurt and smear those who disagreed with him, and in his Government, even the time of day was a state secret. His attack ads against rival politicians were vicious, he was visibly contemptuous of journalists and the Opposition parties, and he almost took pride in being disliked.
What finally defeated Mr Harper was the fact that enough Canadians had grown sick of the nastiness that they were willing to vote for whichever party had the best chance of beating him. At the beginning of the election campaign that looked likely to be the NDP, but a typical piece of Mr Harper nastiness took them down.
The great niqab debate was what did the NDP in. Only two Canadian Muslim women have ever insisted on wearing the face-covering during a citizenship ceremony, but the Conservatives turned banning niqabs into a ‘wedge issue’ and NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said Muslim women should be allowed to wear them.
So did the liberal leader, actually, but it didn't hurt Mr Trudeau because identity politics is not a big thing in most parts of Canada. It's a huge thing in French-speaking Quebec, where the politics has been mostly about Quebec nationalism and separatism for two generations. Rival identities are not welcome in such an environment and almost half the NDP's seats were in Quebec.
Eighty per cent of Quebecers wanted to ban theniqab, and when Mr Mulcair said he opposed a ban the party's support there collapsed. A typically nasty piece of political manipulation, but in fact the Conservatives had been too clever. Previously undecided voters whose only objective was getting rid of Mr Harper swung behind the liberals when they appeared to be the only party that could do the job. Mr Harper might still be in office today if he had just let the two Opposition parties split the anti-Harper vote evenly between them. There are times when nastiness just doesn't pay.
In the end, Mr Trudeau won just by being sunny, positive and nice. He talked a great deal about “change”, because that was what the anti-Harper voters wanted to hear, but he didn't go into much detail.
Mr Trudeau promised a few flagship policy changes to get people's attention pulling Canadian warplanes out of Iraq and Syria, slightly higher taxes for the rich and slightly lower taxes for the middle class, maybe legalising marijuana but his core social and economic policies aren't going to be radically different from Mr Harper's. They can't be, because otherwise he'd have to leave the middle of the road.